I am not suggesting that officers can't stop you from fleeing. The problem is that we already have standards of what they are permitted to do to stop you from fleeing, and those standards don't let them shoot you.
Either let them shoot you for fleeing, or don't. Don't say "they can't shoot you for fleeing" and then let them game fleeing into looking like a threat so they can shoot you for that.
Jiro
7d ago
Yes they are, if you floor it at them.
They can shoot you if you drive at them, but they can't shoot you if you are just fleeing.
If you think they should be able to shoot you for just fleeing, make a law that says they can. If not, don't have policies whose effect is that it's hard to distinguish between fleeing and driving at them, thus letting them shoot you for fleeing.
Jiro
8d ago
If they shoot you because you "attacked an officer" and he "feared for his life" then sure, it was set up by the officer. It's a form of the officers gaming the system.
If the officers try to stop you using a level of force that would be justified in a regular arrest of a fleeing person who is not surrounded but who they (for instance) managed to catch up with, then no.
Jiro
8d ago
The police arrests people for non-violent offenses all the time, you still don't get to floor it to get away from them, and flooring your car at them is violent in itself.
The police are not permitted to shoot you if you floor your car to get away. Even though you "don't get to" do it, the procedure the police must follow in that situation is different. They should not be permitted to blur the difference between that and a situation where they do get to shoot you, and then shoot you because they can't tell the difference.
Jiro
8d ago
The decision to speed off was not set up by the officer, but the inability to distinguish between two types of speeding off (fleeing and attacking the officer) was set up by the officer.
Likewise if the officer handcuffs a knife to your hand, and you flee, your decision to flee was not set up, but if the officer says "for all I know he might be trying to use the knife on me", that lack of knowledge was set up.
Jiro
8d ago
Why? Under that logic, any arrest can negate fear for their life. An arrest is placing themselves into a situation with people who have not been following the law, who may decide to react violently to losing their freedom.
The difference is that in that case the officer would be shooting people who are intentionally violent, not nonviolent people who looked violent because the officer set up the situation in a way that made it hard to tell. It would be as if the officer arrested someone, handcuffed a knife to his hand, and then shot the suspect when he tried to flee because of fear that the suspect would use the knife on him.
(Obviously there is a sliding scale of such things. An arrest causes some increase in nonviolent reactions that appear violent and standing in front of a car causes some increase in actual violence. But I'd say that standing in front of the car is much farther along the scale.)
Jiro
8d ago
She got shot because part of her fleeing meant that she drove into an ICE agent, who now has reasonable cause to fear that she attempted to end his life.
The fact that fleeing meant driving into an ICE agent was under control of the ICE agent. This fact should, under a reasonable set of rules of engagement, negate or at least seriously make harder whether the agent can claim fear for his life, even if he did.
Jiro
8d ago
As I've said before I don't like litigating split second decision making. Most of your post is that.
The only real person with the ability to make decisions beforehand that could have prevented this is Good.
The officer could have prevented it by not getting in front of the car.
Jiro
8d ago
Even if she had not nearly run someone over and no one had shot her, she still did the wrong thing by driving away.
If you can pass a law which says that the authorities can shoot someone for driving away, get it passed.
If you can't pass such a law, then you should let them drive away.
Pick one.
Jiro
10d ago
In order to put a positive spin on it, you have to have the media on your side.
Jiro
10d ago
You'd think so. This doesn't seem to be the case. People who demand resistance to ICE generally won't say out loud "anything you can get away with doing to ICE is justified and anything they do to you isn't". They don't want to sound like that, even if in some sense they believe that. So instead they pretend to argue that the facts of the case make things justified or unjustified, and they claim to be respecting principles that everyone should follow, even if those principles are not a load bearing part of their beliefs. It's fair to take them at their word unless and until they give those principles up.
Jiro
11d ago
I have seen those who want to give the least amount of deference to law enforcement assert that LEOs will place themselves in front of vehicles not just "stupidly" to keep the suspect from escaping, but to manufacture the opportunity to kill the suspect.
I don't care much whether it's deliberate. A practice that without really good reason creates a legal excuse for you to shoot someone who is not otherwise committing a shoot-worthy offense is a bad practice. And it remains so even if the practice was created organically and nobody consciously said "let's do this so we get to shoot the suspect".
Jiro
11d ago
By standing in front of the car, they are creating a situation where fleeing is a threat to their life and therefore they can shoot someone who is fleeing.
Jiro
12d ago
Yes, it's true that an off-ramp to escalation could be gamed by protestors. But it seems to me that the situation is already being gamed by the police (or ICE in this case), and that isn't good either, especially since the police can game things that protestors can't.
If he could have stepped out of the way of the car without shooting, is he morally (not legally) obligated to?
The officer's action is like dropping a gun where a pedestrian might flee, so that if the pedestrian flees, the officer can say "for all I know the pedestrian could have been trying to get the gun" and shoot the pedestrian. It's a form of taking himself hostage so that he can shoot in "self-defense". Morally, he should not take himself hostage in this manner.
Is it reasonable to expect him to recognize the danger has passed and to stop shooting in the fraction of a second this transpired and her car turned away?
I would say it is reasonable to expect him to recognize when the danger has passed, because he was the one who made it difficult to recognize the danger in the first place. He shouldn't make it difficult and then expect anyone to give him slack because it's difficult.
And again, yes this does apply when the protestor is the one deliberately standing in front of the car.
Jiro
13d ago
Never allow police to stand in front of a vehicle. I have no idea what the discussion on this would look like. If standing in front of a vehicle is helpful in determining whether a driver is reaching for a weapon, then this would be a complicated determination.
The police didn't do scientific studies to determine whether standing in front of a vehicle is useful for that purpose. They just say it, and everyone believes them. Given how the police like to game the system by giving undisprovable, bogus, explanations for why they do things (sure, they searched the car because they smelled marijuana), I don't grant much charity to the claim that standing in front of a vehicle is necessary.
I wouldn't say never stand in front of a vehicle. But I would say that if they do, they've deliberately escalated the lethality of the situation by putting themselves in harm's way and as such, the standard for them using lethal force should be made stricter. (And I don't believe that shooting the driver is likely to prevent being hit by the car anyway.) If you think the police should be able to shoot people for fleeing, make a law that says the police can shoot people for fleeing. Without such a law, the police shouldn't turn fleeing into a lethal confrontation just so they can shoot anyway.
And yes, this does apply to other people who block vehicles to put themselves in danger from the driver. The most prominent examples being, ironically, protestors who do so. Hurting such a protestor in the process of getting away from them should be treated leniently.
Jiro
13d ago
Just because they can't convert every situation into assault on an officer doesn't mean that they can't do it at all.
Jiro
13d ago
The problem is that the police can convert actual fleeing into threats to the police through their own actions, and then use the threat to justify killing the suspect. Police love to game the system.
Jiro
13d ago
It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.
If this is what happens, it would be entirely predictable that "black stealing" would come to be interpreted that way, even if it's "incorrect". Jargon phrases whose straightforward meaning is something hostile will predictably result in a motte and bailey between the jargon meaning and the straightforward meaning, especially by hostile people.
Jiro
14d ago
If I coined the term "black stealing" for shoplifting, nobody would be satisfied with my claim that it isn't talking about all black people.
Jiro
14d ago
I don't think it counts as an epicycle to point out "actually, she isn't complaining about being sexualized".
Jiro
15d ago
95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.
Jiro
15d ago
The UN has unofficially defined indigenous people in a gerrymandered way that excludes the English.
In this case it takes two to choose. Unless you're really aiming the car at the police intentionally, I would say that it's not you who are putting their life in danger, it's them, by creating the situation where fleeing can't be distinguished from a threat.
If they handcuffed a knife to your hand almost anything you do would "choose" to put them in danger. Nevertheless, I wouldn't give the police the benefit of the doubt for "danger" when they handcuff knives to suspects' hands.
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